E Komo Mai!  Welcome! Amid all the flurry about the questions of State's Rights; Separation of Church and State; morality; right, center, left; Satan, God; truth, lies; and so forth that fill our hearts, minds and souls in this crucial era in human history...amid all the debate, contention, soul-searching, George Washington saw it all coming, and said it best in l796. The founding father said in part:

"All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle (constitutional government by the people), and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public adminsitration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interest.

"However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominon."

(more in part 2)